Proof-of-Storage Demands a New Internet Architecture

Amazon CloudFront and Cloudflare are built for fast reads, not cryptographic proofs. They offer no guarantees of data persistence or availability, making them unfit for state verification in systems like Celestia or EigenDA.

• No SLAs for Liveness: Data can be purged or geo-blocked.
• Trusted Third-Party: You must believe their logs, not cryptographic hashes.
• Single Point of Failure: Centralized control contradicts decentralized consensus.

Networks like Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail decouple data publication from execution. They provide a cryptographically verifiable data ledger that any node can sample.

• Data Availability Sampling (DAS): Light clients verify petabyte-scale data with ~KB-level downloads.
• Economic Security: Stakers are slashed for withholding data, creating a crypto-economic guarantee.
• Modular Foundation: Enables scalable rollups without monolithic chain bloat.

Traditional ISPs charge for egress, creating a perverse incentive to restrict data flow. This strangles peer-to-peer protocols and makes running a full node for chains like Arweave or Filecoin prohibitively expensive.

• Egress Tax Model: Serving data costs money, discouraging participation.
• Asymmetric Networks: Home connections have high download but puny upload caps.
• No Incentive Alignment: ISPs profit from scarcity, not data ubiquity.

Protocols like Filecoin, Arweave, and Storj rebuild the physical layer with token incentives. They turn bandwidth and storage into a tradable commodity with aligned economics.

• Proof-of-Replication & Spacetime: Cryptographic proofs ensure data is stored and served.
• Market-Based Pricing: A global, permissionless market for storage and retrieval.
• DePIN Expansion: Projects like Helium and Render blueprint the incentive model for physical infrastructure.

The HTTP request-response model is a serialized bottleneck. Fetching and verifying cross-chain state or NFT metadata from thousands of nodes is impossibly slow for dApps, killing user experience.

• Sequential Queries: Clients must poll multiple servers one-by-one.
• No Native Verification: Responses are taken on faith, requiring separate proof verification steps.
• State Explosion: Monolithic chains like Ethereum require syncing terabytes of history.

ZK-proofs (via zkSync, StarkNet) and light client protocols (like those in Cosmos IBC) allow trust-minimized verification without downloading full chain history.

• Succinct Verification: A ~1 KB proof can verify millions of transactions.
• Instant Finality: Cross-chain bridges like IBC use light clients for secure header verification.
• Stateless Clients: Future Ethereum clients may only store state roots, verified by ZKPs, reducing sync time from days to minutes.

AWS S3 and Cloudflare are black boxes for decentralized protocols. They offer no cryptographic proof of data availability or real-time liveness, creating a single point of failure for $10B+ in staked assets.

• Trust Assumption: You must believe their SLA.
• Data Locality: No guarantee data is stored where claimed.
• Censorship Risk: Centralized control over access.

A blockchain-native CDN that stores data permanently with a single upfront fee. Bundlr Network acts as a scalability layer, batching transactions for ~$0.01 per MB and sub-second finality.

• Proof-of-Access: Miners must prove they store random historical data chunks.
• Enduring Storage: 200+ year durability model.
• Native Integration: Direct compatibility with Solana, Ethereum, and Avalanche via Bundlr.

Storing 1GB of data directly on Ethereum L1 would cost millions of dollars. Even L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism are optimized for compute, not bulk data, making large-scale dApp state or media storage impossible.

• Cost Scaling: Linear gas costs destroy economics.
• Throughput Limits: Blockspace is a scarce, contested resource.
• Wrong Tool: Blockchains are for consensus, not raw bytes.

A decentralized storage network that matches users with miners via verifiable storage deals. Uses Proof-of-Replication and Proof-of-Spacetime to cryptographically prove data is stored continuously. FVM enables smart contract-controlled storage.

• Market Dynamics: Competitive pricing from global miners.
• Cryptographic Proofs: Continuous, on-chain verifiability.
• Programmability: FVM allows for automated, trustless storage workflows.

Rollups like Arbitrum post compressed transaction data to L1 for security. If this Data Availability (DA) layer fails or is too expensive, the rollup halts. This creates a massive cost center and centralization risk around a single DA provider.

• L1 Cost: DA can be >90% of a rollup's operating cost.
• Security Dependency: Rollup validity depends entirely on DA.
• Monopoly Risk: Reliance on Ethereum for all data.

Modular blockchains decouple execution from consensus and data availability. Celestia provides a scalable, pluggable DA layer using Data Availability Sampling (DAS), allowing light nodes to verify gigabyte-sized blocks. EigenDA offers a high-throughput DA service built on Ethereum restaking.

• Scalable DA: Celestia targets 100 MB+ blocks.
• Cost Reduction: ~100x cheaper DA vs. Ethereum calldata.
• Ecosystem Play: Enables sovereign rollups and rapid chain deployment.